Sunset
Sunset - meaning Summary
Between Two Changing Worlds
The poem describes sunset as a moment that places the observer between two changing realms: the earthly trees and the ascending heavens. Rilke emphasizes a suspended state in which a person belongs to neither world, experiencing alternating moods of inertia and transcendence. Life itself is pictured as shifting between heaviness and luminous aspiration, sometimes blocked and rooted, sometimes reaching outward and becoming like a star.
Read Complete AnalysesSlowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors which it passes to a row of ancient trees. You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth. leaving you, not really belonging to either, not so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent, not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing that turns to a star each night and climbs- leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads) your own life, timid and standing high and growing, so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out, one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.
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